Comment Re:Sorry :) (Score 1) 274
As of July 31, there were 150,000 downloads of Stephen King's new work, of which 116,000 paid the $1 fee. He's made these $116,000 just because of his high reputation, but, he spent more than that just to market that book.
For a multi-million-seller like a platinum album or Harry Potter book, the "please donate a dollar" scheme just isn't going to work. On the other hand, if you look at the recent furor over the Harry Potter book, and all the pre-sales, and so forth, you can easily see that it would have been very easy to ask people to pay upfront, and very lucrative.
Also, I hate to say this, but most of the music being produced for free is worth every penny---i.e., it's just not that great. (Especially in the classical genres. The MP3 artists in the classical genres completely suck. I'm sorry to say that, but it's true.) At some point, certain artists are going to become more popular than the others, and are going to be allowed to demand more.
If your next song gets you $400,000, rather than $400, then I know you'll start thinking to yourself, "Hmm, now that I've got a reputation for quality...."
A lot of people confuse my opinion that "prepay is inevitable" with the fact that I think "prepay is good". I don't think anything is good or bad. I download free things all the time. I started using linux in '94, when 0.99 was made official, and my experience with the 'net goes back way before then. I know all about free. I was a regular user of Gutenberg even before there was such a thing as the Web; and more recently, you could say I made a major contribution to the HTTP logs of the free book section of ebooks.barnesandnoble.com,due to my clever use of curl.
But I'm also a grown-up, and I know all about the world works, and how bills need to get paid. My opinion is that prepayment is inevitable, not that it's good or bad, and that once an artist becomes famous and/or popular, they will start thinking "do I devote myself to this full time, or not? Do I get paid for it, or not?", and at that time, they will decide to convert from a donation-only model to a prepayment model.
I think that only time will tell, but I'm pretty confident that prepayment will arrive, one day or another.
P.S. Microsoft killed Netscape because they are a zillion-dollar company, and can afford to put out IE as a "loss leader". Also, because they were able to develop IE5 while Netscape spent their money on plastic dinosaurs and Corporate Headquarters With Waterfalls. There are lots of little software companies, but there's only one M$, and it's the M$s of the world who will demand the prepayment.
People think that artists like Van Gogh were "starving artists" who never sold their art. That's pure baloney. Van Gogh was the son of a rich industrialist, and had a brother who supported him. The "starving artist" is a myth. There isn't a one on the planet, and there never was.
Finally, unlike Mozilla, the various forms of artwork like music, art and literature absolutely do not lend themselves to open-source collaborative development. You can't "fix a bug" in a Picasso or "add a feature" to a Nirvana tune. It still takes unique people with unique visions, and some of those visions are going to be worth more than others.
If you put up a form saying "Prepay a required $1 for the next release of Metallica when it comes out", or "Pay a volutary $1 for Anonymous Artist to download their new music", I think Metallica will get plenty of $1 payments, regardless of the extreme vocal opinions on the subject at places like slashdot.
But hey, let's not argue. Let's test the theory. We're all scientists, right? Let's see if we can get a high-profile artist to try it. I really think people will be surprised.
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Orlando, Paladin of Charlemagne
